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Comment by ein0p | Hacker News Reader

It is not possible for this to be fully private in the United States because the government not only can force Apple to open up the kimono, it can also forbid it to talk about it. There’s not really anything Apple can do to work around this “limitation”. Thank your “representative” for extending the PATRIOT Act when you get a chance.

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Private Cloud Compute servers have no persistent storage so there would be nothing to see upon opening the kimono. You'd need some sort of government requested live wire tap thing to harvest the data out of the incoming requests, which might be a different situation. I'm, of course, just some dude on the internet, thinking up a counter-point to this concern, who knows if I am even remotely in the right ballpark.

mandatory 30 day retention policies or something like it

You can't mandate retention on stuff you're not storing anyway - or because of encryption can't store.

You would think that, but cell carriers have been found to retain both plaintext and encrypted traffic for several years in some cases: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vqkv/how-fbi-gets-phone-da...

Cell carriers aren't a bastion of end to end encryption, the tech just can't do it.

That's why you use them just as dumb pipes forwarding encrypted data traffic from one place to another.

No SMS, no phone calls if you can avoid it.

Speaking of tech, has anyone ever independently audited Apple's encrypted infrastructure a-la what they're promising for Private Compute? I'm unconvinced that the government couldn't crack that if they wanted.

Apple already services US Gov cloud data requests, see e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/eqg5gc/apple_compl...

> have no persistent storage

How often do PCC servers reboot and wipe the temporary encryption key?

> Private Cloud Compute servers have no persistent storage so there would be nothing to see upon opening the kimono

It doesn't actually say there is no persistent storage, it says that the compute node will not store it for longer than the request. There's nothing to stop the data coming from a datastore outside of the "PCC" in another part of apple's infrastructure.

Slightly off-topic, "open up the kimono" sounds disturbing and creepy to me as an Asian. I suspect I'm not alone in this.

That’s even better. I do think it’s disturbing and creepy when someone goes through my private data without my knowledge.

That's not what they meant or what the phrase means. It's mildly racist and misogynist, and the kinds of discomfort it elicits are not the kind that will make people trust you, the user of the phrase.

Some share your sentiment. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/11/02/360479744...

Is this phrase worth an entire long form blog post from NPR?

Honestly, why not? I love reading about etymologies and I know that many people here do as well.

I'm not sure how I've been in tech since before this article was written and today is the first time I've ever even seen/heard this phrase.

There's a difference between guaranteed privacy and certifiable privacy. Yes, the government can request one's data. However, Apple's system would reveal those intrusions to the public, even if Apple themselves couldn't say it.

How?

What Apple can do (and appears to be doing throughout its products) is not have the data requested. Or not have it in cleartext. NSLs can't request data that doesn't exist anymore.

LLMs work on clear text inputs

But the setup is that Apple doesn't know which cleartexts currently being processed are associated with which user meaning that even live surveillance can't work without surveilling everybody, making any such program very quickly discoverable. Read the section about non-targetability in the link.

Apple deserves credit for correctly analyzing their threat model and designing their system accordingly.

I’m willing to concede that Apple’s system is the best designed of the bunch. I’m not willing to call it “private”, however, if it processes unencrypted inputs in the jurisdiction of a nation state with pervasive government surveillance.

I agree from a technical perspective actually. What this system does to counteract that is use a social strategy. The government couldn't break "this specific system" without a lot of people knowing, and that makes it very likely that they would be discovered. And not in a vague way but in a very specific one.

Would this work in some authoritarian countries? No and Apple doesn't care. Would it work in a western one? Maybe.

Their post sure makes it seam like it’s possible. Was there something that stood out to you?

I mean, the software running on the client (phone/mac/ipad) is closed-source and, if we assume Apple is compromised, can be made to circumvent all of these fancy protections at the push of a button.

If pressured by the government, Apple can simply change the client software to loosen the attestation requirements for private compute. And that would be the most inconspicuous choice.

Or target a device by IMEI or iCloud to be candidate to receive a software update, and push an update that sends data to "dev-llm-assistant.ai.apple.com".

"oh it's our dev version ? what's the problem ? we need data access for troubleshooting"

Warrant canary

Apple removed theirs year ago.

The orders in question aren’t search warrants and don’t require probable cause.

70,000+ Apple user accounts are surveilled in this manner every year.

It makes zero sense for a company of this size. I bet they are served with gag orders like daily, so the warrant canary is going to expire the moment it is published.

It seems to me that this security architecture is a direct response to the hostile regulatory environment Apple finds themselves in wrt USA PATRIOT and the CCP et al.

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